Deciding where to live is a very important part of your journey in being an expat in Da Nang. It can make all the difference between who you hang out with, what sort of stuff you have access to, and how much you are going to pay per month. While this city isn't geographically huge, there are a lot of people here (over 1 million) so when you are choosing a place to live, you might find yourself spending a lot of time in your neighborhood and hardly ever leaving it because of traffic. I know that I rarely leave mine.
Today I am going to somewhat cynically take a look at criteria you should keep in mind when choosing a place to call home in this fine city.
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The above is probably the idea you are going to have in mind with how you are going to live your life in this wonderful beachside city but I'll go ahead and say "good luck with that because it almost certainly isn't going to happen."
If you can even find a place that is sea view that does long-term rentals it is going to cost a relative fortune because these places, even now in the absence of tourism, are hesitant to charge anything other than daily rates. What is more likely is that you are going to live a few blocks from the beach and this is where things get a bit tricky.
It seems as though this entire city is under construction and while there would be laws regarding noise that probably exist in your country, they sure as shit don't exist here and avoiding construction noise is something that is VERY important and also very difficult to accomplish. I've lived in 3 different places and have basically given up at this point and settled on a condo with double-glazed somewhat soundproof windows. The construction noise comes from all direction and after a while you forget it is there, that is unless it is right next door to you. Here are some tips on how to avoid this.
When looking at a potential condo, if there is a vacant lot next to it, do NOT sign a long term lease. Sure they will offer you price incentives to you in order to do so but that vacant lot... well, it isn't going to stay that way for very long. This area seems to have an objective to build something on every available plot of land and it is never-ending.
You might be thinking "oh that plot of land is too small for them to put anything of consequence there" and you would be terribly wrong in this assumption.
There is a reason why most buildings here do not have windows on the sides of them and that is because the owners know it is only a matter of time until someone builds something that is damn near flush with the building next to it. There doesn't seem to be any vertical limitations on buildings where I live and people are just building taller and taller. It's ugly as hell even when they are finished. Very few operations bother with purchasing the land next to it in order to prevent this from happening. I can't think of even one to be honest.
Sure you can go ahead and move into these places month-by-month but once the decision gets made to build something, it is going to be going on for a very long time and they don't give half a damn about your sleep schedule.
If you are already living somewhere and you are walking nearby your condo one day and spot a pile of rocks, sand, or bricks, go ahead and make plans to relocate. These are the early warning signs of upcoming relentless noise. What is even worse is when you see one of these things get dropped off.
It would be wonderful if this was just someone's storage unit but no, this is going to be a construction office and probably for a very big project the likes of which you can see in the background of the same picture. I have 3 of these that I can see from the roof of my building and the only reason why I am not moving now is because I don't know how much longer I am going to be in this country. I have a rooftop pool and I wish it could be a relaxing experience but it can't be unless you are currently under the water. We have the sounds of power-tools coming from all directions from around 7am until about 10pm every damn day of the week.
Another surefire sign of upcoming unrelenting noise is when you encounter this. This pile of debris from where a structure once stood has been that way for a long time. I presume that Covid put a stop to whatever plan they had to build on the same lot but rest-assured, as soon as they can resume the pile-driving, drilling, and cement trucks arriving very late into the night, that is precisely what they are going to do.
If you want a quiet place to live in Da Nang I'll go ahead and go out on a limb and say that the only way that you are going to be able to accomplish this is going to be living in a kind of out of the way location that no one wants to build on. This means not being near the beach in most situations.
I kind of regret my decision to try to live so close to the beach since I rarely use the beach anyway. If quiet is what you are after and trust me, after a while it will be because it is so terribly rare here, you need to move into one of the neighborhoods where the streets are too small for it to ever accommodate meaningful levels of traffic. This doesn't guarantee quiet by any means, but it does make it a lot more likely.